I'm talking about Jani Lane, former frontman of Warrant who wrote some good music and then some not-so-good music. See, Warrant was one of the big players of glam metal in the 80s, a genre that represented all the decadence of rock music portrayed in the worst neon-pink light in the world. It was a parody of rock and roll that served only to show how cool the drugs, booze, girls, and money were in the industry (see second half of the 80s records by Motley Crue, Poison, Ratt, Whitesnake, Cinderella, etc.).
The musicians in a lot of these bands actually started out as decent musicians who wanted to rock out, but just like the boy bands in the 90s, hip hop in the 2000s, and pre-pubescent teenage heartthrobs in the 2010s, 80s metal eventually became, as Twisted Sister's Dee Snider said, "processed (and) refined", and basically a huge fucking joke created to appeal a wasted youth that fed on catchy guitar riffs, long hair, hair dye, leather pants, no shirts, overloads of makeup, formulaic ballads, and a plethora of sexual innuendos (I promise this isn't just a rant against 80s metal--I'm coming back to Jani Lane in a second).
Although it's easy to point fingers at the faces in these music videos, a lot of these musicians had record deals that kept them on the hook with these labels that pressured them to change their style radically, or simply write songs that adopted this glam sound that wasn't very glamorous. As a result of this musical renaissance, there was no shortage of crappy and suggestive songs that hit the radio such as Poison's "Talk Dirty to Me", Motley Crue's "Girls Girls Girls", and Warrant's "Cherry Pie".
In case you haven't seen it, here's a link to the "Cherry Pie" video (you might have to watch 7 ads beforehand. Just FYI).
In case you don't wanna see it, it's essentially a song that uses a cherry pie as a symbol for a vagina, and in case it isn't obvious, a slice of cherry pie falls right in between a woman's legs. They're essentially spoon-feeding you this piece of information. Bad jokes aside and long story short, Warrant finished writing an album called "Uncle Tom's Cabin"(no relation to the book or slavery) in 1989 named after the main single in the album. Pretty standard, right?
Well, the record head decided that they didn't have a provocative song with a pop sound that would result in a mega-hit, so Warrant frontman Jani Lane wrote Cherry Pie to appease him. Instead of summarizing the repercussions of this record, I'll just quote Lane directly from a 2009 VH1 interview:
All of a sudden, the album's called Cherry Pie, the record's called Cherry Pie, I'm doing cherry pie-eating contests, the single's Cherry Pie...and my legacy's Cherry Pie. Everything about me is Cherry Pie. I'm the Cherry Pie guy. I could shoot myself in the fucking head for writing that song.
Now you could point at the fact that it was all his creation, but the history of how record labels squeezed rock bands in the 80s would beg to differ. And Cherry Pie simply became such a huge phenomenon, that everything about Lane's life would revolve around that song, and the only people to blame are the media and the people who see him as only that--a product, not a person.
Now why did I share all of this with you? Well, many former 80s glam rockers are now middle-aged, overweight alcoholics struggling to make a living (see Bret Michaels and the 36 seasons of his dating show). But Lane is the one that stuck out to me because his name popped into my head two days ago. That VH1 interview stuck with me, and I did a quick Google search to see whatever happened to him. I was both shocked and not surprised at all that he died in 2011 of acute alcohol poisoning by himself. He drank himself to death.
I'm not sure whether or not it was suicide, but one can easily conclude that Cherry Pie led to all this. It made him a bitter, jaded, and depressed alcoholic who was deprived of his sense of self through this movement. After I read this, I said "well, at least he won't have to be the poster boy for cherry pies everywhere anymore, right?"
Wrong. There's an upcoming biopic on him coming out soon called Cherry Pie Guy. At the very least, I hope that this movie ends up stressing a similar point to mine on this post. Nah, it'll probably just be this for two hours.
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